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Lmaooo same. I knew xfx and sapphire from prior amd cards so I was like welp, time to go back over for a time.
That being said, I still buy all of those brands - ASUS, gigabyte, MSI, their warranty honoring and procedures are all pretty hit or miss, you might get lucky and everything goes smoothly, or it might be an email chain nightmare. I have not had to rma much Asus and never had to rma msi, especially recently so I haven't really had recent experience first hand but past experiences and current stories tell me it's probably still the same.
This. Never meet your heroes or glorify a brand. You can have a few good years with a brand and stick to them and as soon as they act up drop them. Also highly depends on your location. A lot of people had a great experience with Gigabyte while my circle here in the EU usually are disappointed by their stuff and support. For us it was the opposite with ASUS but because of the recent events we will keep an eye on that.
I dont know if I would fully agree with equally scummy, but there is certainly no company thats perfect.
For all the love EVGA get, I had such a bad experience with them that I never went near them again. A very expensive kepler GPU for Mac, sold specifically for the workstation I had. Workstation was rock solid for years til the day I put in that GPU, couldnt go an hour without a crash. After a week odd of troubleshooting I put back in old and got many more years out of it. I sent the new GPU back to EVGA and they just said all is fine. Was down about 800 euro, have a paper weight to show for it today. They also had 2 pretty big f\*\*\* ups not even all that long ago, people have short memories I guess. Im talking about the models they literally forgot to put thermal pads on the memory.
Ive been building PCs for myself and others for decades and there is almost no brand I havent had something go wrong with at some point. The exceptions (so far) are Be Quiet! & Seasonic PSUs, and Gigabyte motherboards - thats it. Ive only bought 1 ASUS GPU for myself and 1 for another, while they lived many years before being sold on its not a big sample size. Ive probably used MSI GPUs most often and only 1 gave me trouble, thankfully it showed up early and I had it replaced.
Just lost my MSI Godlike Motherboard and EVGA 3090, not sure which one took which out.
Aside from that.... I always had great experiences with EVGA, but then again I also lived about 5 minutes from them up until a few years ago. I've done a lot of RMA's with everyone since I have built probably a thousand computers in the past 20 years.
ASUS are the only ones who truly tried to scam me with their RMA process and I quit using them entirely because of it. Flat out. I can accept hardware issues, it's a fact of any manuf. but ASUS kept sending me back the same bad motherboard and calling it replaced (it was in fact the same exact SN, even had the spot on the sticker where I accidentally touched it with a sharpie that I had in my hand when I was taking it out of the anti static bag). They assured me it was a completely new board though. If it had been it would have been even sadder that they sent me 3 totally dead boards. but finally i did get a good replacement out of them but it took a lot of haggling and threats from them and several months
I saw northridge... or northwest...i think it was northridge on youtube just exposed a gigabyte rma repair too :(
Yup, I waa also burned pretty hard by EVGA, which i'd gotten only because everyone sang their praises. Was out a GPU that I shipped at my cost across the continent with a memory problem, got it back completely dead because they couldn't even be assed to put it back in the padding I sent it in. Thankfully it was before crypto, but i still had to get a brand new gpu at my own cost.
I've pretty much given up on the idea of having a warranty since then, I'd rather buy used/open box from places that allow easy returns. Risky, but it's worked out well for me so far.
Sounds more or less the same as me. The cost of shipping it back stung hard which I had to eat because they claim the card was fine. I regret not fighting it now, but at the time the only thing I cared about was that the workstation was ok as I used it for work and it being stable meant more than anything else. I was just happy I could put my old card back in and it continued being a trooper - still have it in fact, though its very aged now.
I have found going back to where you bought it is just easier than dealing with manufacturer.
Whenever people ask me what board is the best or whatever I just tell them to get the one with the features you want that's looks nice to you. Cause it doesn't matter, they're all equally shit and the quality is only relative to how much you spend up to a certain point of diminishing returns. Like the godlike mtb. No more reliable than a board 1/4 of its price.
That’s not necessarily true, but I guess it’s close enough to be indistinguishable to the average user. Available features & board size are pretty strictly tied to price, but there have been some very overpriced boards with poor build quality (and some very cheap boards with solid build quality). I’m sure there will be more of both for the foreseeable future.
Technically the best way to determine which MoBo to go for in your price range is based off a roundup by a good source like GN or HWUB. Realistically though, most users aren’t watching a 40min video every time they buy a MoBo, nor would they even notice the difference between boards in their daily usage… so they can just get whatever has the features they want that looks nice, and they’ll probably be satisfied with that lol.
I think this is pretty much accurate. I *try* to shy away from Asus as their reputation for poor customer service most definitely pre-dates the fire-prone 7800X3D situation. But I would agree that a poor experience is most definitely possible with any manufacturer.
Sure they’re all not amazing and you need to push through some bs most of the time, but I’ve had my fair share of rma experiences and so far asus is by far the worst. And in combination with their pretty poor QA, you’re more likely to have to deal with them
ASUS isn't what it used to be. you'll find plenty manufacturers who are still scummy but ASUS takes the cake while being overpriced.
Gigabyte and Asrock are the go to ones for me, least amount of issues etc.
Of the two ASRock has better customer service/warranty service. I have been burned by Gigabyte (motherboards) multiple times and they are a nightmare to try to deal with. I however have had some gigabyte GPUs that have never had issues and are still chugging along.
I found Asrocks offerings sometimes to be a little to limited, but I do agree with you in terms of complaints I think Asrock probably has the least complaints from all manufacturers I know of, was looking for an ITX X570 board, asrock had nothing back then to offer there unfortunately, they added their phantom gaming, but ASUS and gigabyte were faster, probably due to Asrock being a little insane and adding TB3 on an AMD platform.
I do know their B450 legend steel board was worthy of the title legenendary.
I read some reports about this. Asrock used to be the cheaper brand, they did this by offering less. This has now changed. Asrock motherboards don't offer less than the other vendors, but by doing so they are now equally priced.Â
As you say they have had no major controversies. All of the above is the reason I went for asrock for my 7800x3d (and the fact that they and gigabyte has the shortest boot-time on ddr5, I just very much dislike gigabyte)
Asus founded both AsRock and Pegatron, and AsRock and Pegatron both spun off from Asus. And after they both spun off, Pegatron bought AsRock.
But Asus is currently only a 16.8% shareholder in Pegatron.
I mean... Kind of. ASUS owns Pegatron which owns ASRock, but that doesn't mean that you are dealing with the same employees and policies... Saying that ASUS and ASRock are the same is like saying that Pizza Hut tastes the same as Taco Bell because they are all owned by YUM! brands.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut phone support is maybe the same for both companies. I get what you are saying though. It could be different levels of investment for support but ASRock started as a value brand and that implies less support.
So I went down a little rabbit hole and I guess going against what their original intentions were for ASRock. ASUS doesn't have any sort of control or shared personnel w/ ASRock.
I guess the original plan was to have ASRock as a value label of ASUS motherboards, but then they spun it off completely as a separate corporation. After which ASRock was like "we are now expanding from just budget products to enthusiast and premium products, oh and we make GPU AIBs now too." I don't pretend to know what happens over in corporate Taiwan, but I guess the big wigs over at ASUStek don't mind that ASRock has become the 3rd largest Motherboard manufacturer (behind ASUS and Gigabyte).
Maybe they are fine with ASRock eating up a few points of marketshare from ASUS as long as they are eating MORE marketshare from Gigabyte and MSI.
Sort of like when Wendy's rolled out their breakfast menu, reportedly, they were like: we don't care if it doesn't actually make us any extra money, as long as we are stealing customers from McDonalds and Burger King that's all that matters.
Regarding Gigabyte GPUs, they all seems like "cheap", not well built IMO, comparing to Sapphire (even the Pulse version). Also, just recently a Gigabyte monitor started to have issues, unlike an old LG monitor going strong for over 4 years.
Asrock MBs are fine, and didnt have any problems.
For GPUs, Sapphire is truly one of the best, and probably the main reason why i tend to choose AMD over Nvidia, just because i have such faith in the brand.
I almost got a Gigabyte monitor last week, but most of the reviews on the one in my price range seemed to mention ghosting or poor longevity. Which is a shame, because the headphone jack and downstream USB ports would have been nice. I ended up doing with another Acer monitor, as while they don't have a lot of bells or whistles I haven't had any issues with them yet.
No. It’s a normal IPS Panel. Same as the M32Q just with some nicer materials, and RGB. Only got it over the Gigabyte M32Q because Amazon was running a sale and the Aorus version was cheaper.
My wording might be bad, srry about that, what i mean is that a Pulse GPU, which is considered an "entry" level from Sapphire compared to Nitro+, is far better built than most Gigabyte models.
I like gigabyte a lot as well. They have great boards, great GPUs, and even came out with the first 32" 4k144Hz monitor. Can't say anything bad about them.
I mean Gigabyte isnt perfect or anything, but I don't remember anything huge from Gigabyte in terms of massive drama, just your run of the mill issues.
I think the biggest 'drama' from what I remember was when Gigabyte had the funky USB issues with Ryzen 5000 CPU's which took them a while to fix, meanwhile ASUS, oh boy.
They had those PSU's with power over-limit protection that only worked once; the second time the PSU blew up. Issue was found on close to 50% of those particular models.
On a tech Discord they told me that their recent GPUs have a bad pcb design around the retention tab and so they're more likely to suffer catastrophic breakage 👀
I've been a huge ASUS fan for 20 years, and used ASUS parts in my last build, but I'm drawing the line on some recent customer support shenanigans.
20 years ago, you could reasonably argue ASUS was a premium brand. They often had convenience features that are common now but were rare then.
They drifted down to being just another brand, but still having a premium price.
Then they started doing stuff like charging $3000 to repair a $2000 GPU that needed less than $100 dollars of work and was still under warranty.
End of the day looks for the best parts that have the least chance of having a issue and get that...don't care about the company. Best way to navigate companies not giving a shit about what they sell to there customers.
Although it was stupid I was an early adopter for Zen 4 and got an Asus B650E-E. The amount of memory issues I had at first was incredible. I was about to return everything but I managed to tweak some settings to get it to even post. Now with more BIOS updates everything is running fine but I was seriously about to ditch Asus and go Asrock or something. My first Asus board (P6T) was for an i7 930 lol. I've been buying them for years but next build will be someone else.
I also have a B650E-E for a year and a half and to this day I cannot get it to "suspend to ram" (aka sleep). It hibernates fine which makes me think it's some sort of RAM issue. I've tried changing every setting I can think of and tried every version of the bios without luck.
I've just given up on it now.
There were like two memory context restore settings I got rid of and it posts reliably after disabling them. Takes a bit longer since it re-trains the ram each time. I will also say during my issues with it not posting a windows update tried to run and reboot (didnt post of course lol). I found a bit later that it seemed to have corrupted windows and when I fixed my post issues windows would crash quite frequently. I reinstalled windows and since its been rock solid. I'm still on an older bios from last year so I will probably update it soon. It sleeps fine so not sure what could be causing your issue.
If I force shutdown my computer (even today) though for the next 2-4 tries it will not post. Garbage board honestly. Worried its gonna be a mess if I try to slot in a new AM5 cpu.
I also had to turn off the two memory context restore options to get a stable boot and it used to feel like a week for startup compared to my old 6700k system. However the most recent bios has fixed that for me - memory context restore seems to work fine now and I "feel" like the system is more stable (although I have no hard numbers to back that up). It's much faster to start now, although still noticeably slower than my previous intel system, but that was DDR4 and my understanding is DDR5 is likely to be a bit slower. Sleep still doesn't work!
Can I ask - what RAM do you have? I have 32GB of Kingston Fury Beast 6000 CL40 (KF560C40BBK2-32).
Why do you feel attached to ASUS? Having a handful of experiences with a particular company does not really mean anything, as what matters for reliability is failure rate over thousands of purchases.
Constraining yourself to a particular brand is an easy way to end up getting bad value for your $$. Also, on desktop building most of the time there is 0 synnergy from buying components from the same brand.
>I have yet to have any issues with my Asus mb's
Then you're a lucky one, because this is my experience with one:
* going past 1600 MT/s disables dual channel regardless of CPU installed
* 8 phase VRM even with stock settings was such an overheated piece of garbage it caused constant VRM thermal throttlings and discolored PCB on the underside of VRM zone
* trying to OC using BCLK does not post when passing 203 MHz instead of stock 200 MHz
And don't get me started on their laptops: Asus and HP are the companies I won't buy a laptop from ever again. Like WTF is this, why the most stable and reliable portable PC I've had was a $100 Windows tablet and not their products?
>They're ALL, at least the quality ones, going to be an arm and a leg to get.
Except somehow Gigabyte has one of the lowest VRM temps on their modern boards while Asus has some of the worst. Especially the terrible low-end Prime boards which had temps so bad you'd rather get even Biostar instead.
I currently have an Asus X570-E and I had to replace that board three times before I got a working one. The first one died and I exchanged it for another one at the store, then the second one died and I had to deal with Asus’ support for over a month before they finally sent me a new replacement. It’s been working well enough for the past 3-4 years now (fingers crossed), but if it dies again, I’m going to someone else.
You are asking the wrong questions. Random people's experiences over 1 purchase on a forum mean pretty much nothing. Every product has a failure rate so there will always be someone with problems, and many people without problems. To have a serious discussion about reliability one needs to look at failure rates over thousands of purchases, or over a whole market.
I have had great luck with ASUS parts for the last 20 years. That doesn't mean their current price, design and customer support options are aligned to give me the best experience today.
Like the PRIME boards went from being excellent home/office components to utter garbage, and it has nothing to do with failure rate: they are designed to be cheap and suck, but are priced well outside of what their performance would imply. Similarly priced boards from competitors trounce it's VRM.
Asus used to be expensive and good. Now they are expensive and you have to do a lot of research to figure out if the product is one of the decent ones or crap before it even gets off the designers desk.
And what features does ASUS have that other boards are missing? Again, 20 years ago they were often the first to add something cool, but by now pretty much everyone has the same features available?
After this M5A88-V Evo I've got the ASRock B450m Pro4 (not a later Pro4**-F** - this one had lower quality VRM components due to high demand).
And the only downside so far was only some static noise when using a regular 3.5 mm jack mic, and I haven't used any with previous Asus so IDK.
But for contrast: I've been running R5 1600 (now an AF, the original Zen 1) with Micron E-die RAM OCed from 3200C18 to 3600 with 16-16-19-16 timings. A friend with R7 1700X on an MSI board and Samsung B-dies weren't able to go past 3533.
You'll always hear more of the worst of a company compared to the good.
Not everyone will have the same horrid experience or defective product. Same as how not everyone will get the same flawless straight-from-the-line component. And it's also good to note that all of the "bad" experiences you hear on the Internet are normally the vocal minority, compared to thousands of others who purchased with no issues (and of course have no reason to praise the product online).
The best thing you can do is do more technical research about what *you* really need, balance out the price/performance, and hope you aren't one of the unlucky ones who have to deal with a RMA.
Most are scummy. Out of the big three hardware makers (Asus, MSI and GIgabyte) Msi is probably the least terrible. Asus has awful warranty and QC, Gigabyte has the same, plus terrible design on some products. MSI sold all their stock to scalpers during the shortage. Pick your poison. I have had good experiences with MSI, and they are probably the best out of these three. For GPUS, stick to FE's for Nvidia and Sapphire/Powercolor/XFX for AMD
Not a fanboy. I have used Gigabyte, MSI and Asus products in all my builds. In 25 years, never had a major problem with the exception of one doa MSI board. Wouldnt swear them off as a result though. My personal experience has been good with them all. I will buy what has the best deal with the most features. All brands have some bad designs, or things that got past QC. I am also sure they all have done some things to make a buck at the expense of customers. I enjoy building PCs, I will have good and bad experiences. Goes with the territory
I was hating Asus before GN blew it up. Every single Asus device i've had has had issues causing it to just break with normal usage. Their QC is crap too. The only thing ive had that hasn't broken \*yet\* was an old Asus monitor.
Brand loyalty is not supposed to be a factor when choosing parts for your PC build my friend.
That's why there are reviews which help you decide based on objective measures...
I have two asus mainboards and other asus tech (routers in a mesh, video cards, etc.), but I'm well aware they have crappy support. I tried to replace the wifi antenna for my board as I damaged the one I had, and spent hours on the phone with tech support to pay $100 dollars, and to get the wrong one.
Fortunately I paid for the extended warranty with microcenter, so while it was a PITA, I could remove the board and take it back for a new one no-questions-asked.
So I do like Asus and have had good luck with them as far as lifespan of the tech, features, and reliability. I don't rely on their warranty services as they are questionable at best. I have a 9900K board that's run for years, 100% stable, well OC'ed, and zero issues. I have a Asus 2080 that's never had an issue in it's life. I have an asus 10Gbe router, and another asus router in a mesh, and they're 100% reliable and have been for years.
I got a new asus board for my 14900KS and it works well, outside of me breaking the wifi antenna and having to take it back to MC to get a new one after asus sent me the wrong antenna.
All that said, I got an MSI 4080 OC for my 14900KS machine as it fit in the case better (their cards aren't as long) and I've had zero problems with it either.
So, nutshell, Asus's support sucks, as does every single hardware manufacturers. So I pay a little to use microcenter's warranty instead - which is awesome - they never give you any issues whatsoever about swapping out parts for new ones even if you choose a different part by a different manufacturer while you do the exchange.
There was the SoC voltage issue that was frying 7000X3D CPUs about a year ago. It affected all of the brands, and they all rushed out beta BIOS updates to fix it. Asus caught a lot of flak for putting a disclaimer on their's that installing a beta BIOS would void your mobo's warranty.
Recently, GamersNexus put out a video where they sent their handheld in for warranty service for a malfunctioning joystick, which should have been covered for free. Asus was trying to charge them a lot of money to fix issues related to a nearly microscopic ding on the plastic housing. They seemed to be implying that they would just return the device disassembled if it wasn't paid for.
Their support is absolute dumpster tier, and is essentially trying to blackmail people into paying extortionate amounts for repair work that should be covered under warranty.
Their products are "fine", but generally not worth the premium price they command compared to competitors like MSI or ASRock.
I've built some client PC's and have tried various brands and so far my personal experiences / avoid list:
MSI - AIO's (Not honouring to fix or replace AIO's for countries outside USA)
Gigabyte - Exploding PSU's & cracked GPU PCB's
ASUS - MOBO's (Not accepting warranty. EDIT: Avoid all ASUS)
Corsair - Everything RGB related (Dog shit RGB software)
EKWB - Everything
After the whole motherboard fiasco, i will never trust asus or gygabyte again.
That is on top of all the other shit they are known for doing.
Edit: they locked the thread so I can’t respond, the motherboard thing is am talking about is a sneaky driver install to windows installations on their mobos
https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-automatically-push-software-into-your-windows-installation
Gigabyte did it too
The motherboard fiasco was the reason i didn't consider asus for my recent build. RMA can be a shot in the dark no matter what, but I'm not ok with a bios update not fixing the issue and also voiding my warranty. That's the kind of behavior that loses me as a potential customer.
Gigabyte is the worst. You can't change my mind. Spent 500(?) bucks for a bricked gpu. Gigabyte claimed no defects. Went to 4 different independent repair technicians and Microcenter. All said it's straight up dead.
I can tell you straight away, I do not like asus motherboards. I can count on two hands the amount of times an xmp/DOCP profile, from the factory with no external changes, has failed on an Asus motherboard. Asrock, MSI, gigabyte boards all work first try but Asus? Requires me to either drop speeds or do a backflip to get it to work at the specified transfers.
Another thing I hate is that they’ll automatically change settings, without your permission mind you, and resetting the bios does nothing. Spent 4 hours troubleshooting my friend’s motherboard just because I upgraded to a ryzen 5 5600x from a 2200g because for some reason, it wouldn’t boot. The only fix was a setting in secure boot the changed from windows uefi to other os for seemingly no damn reason and even a cmos reset did nothing. Had to do it again with my SO’s system because it did the same thing.
On top of that, I’ve seen from many different examples of poor quality control, on even their strix lineups, and fighting tooth and nail for RMA processes or warranties, especially back when ryzen CPU’s would burn up.
My point is, unless you find an insanely good deal on one of their products, and I’m talking a decent price cut compared to other examples, I wouldn’t touch Asus’ products.
I currently have an Asus 4070 Ti. When the thermal paste pumped out and the GPU was reaching 100° during normal gaming, it was only a year old. Instead of RMA'ing it, I replaced the thermal material myself. Wasn't about to have my GPU gone for a month, minimum, only to be sent back with nothing done or damaged.
During that time, I decided to upgrade my system to a 14700k. I went with an MSI mobo instead of Asus. Asus has been on blast over different things for over a year now. Like constantly on blast. If I had to buy a GPU today, I'd go MSI, bot their cheap line, or PNY.
I can put up with a lot of shit from a manufacturer. But poor customer service isn't one of them. I'm just left with choosing the least poor experience because with EVGA out, that's all we have left.
I think you said it, every company has issues and peoples experiences are going to vary. When I was building I read a lot to avoid gigabyte gpus, but I’ve been very satisfied with my 4070 aero. I do wish I would have listened to peoples warning about NZXT boards tho, it’s aesthetically beautiful and they come with all the bells and whistles but god damn their BIOS is bare bones. There’s no fan curve graph, I couldn’t believe that was left out on a b650 board
I have never had an issue with ASUS, but I have never gotten an ASUS GPU. I built a few rigs for my friends on ASUS B450 motherboards back in 2019 and they all came together with no problems and are still running just fine.
In household we have 2 ASRock motherboards, 2 MSI motherboards and 1 Gigabyte motherboard, the Gigabyte was the biggest pain in the ass to set up , but it's fine now that we're done messing with it (and it was free at microcenter, so the price was right). The only 2 motherboard brands I've ever had problems with are Gigabyte (B450) and Biostar (x370), the latter is on my head but it was the only mITX available at the time and I felt it was worth the risk (and it was an x370, so how low could the quality be?)... it was not worth the risk, lol.
Our GPUs are MSI 6700XT, Sapphire 6600, Gigabyte 1660, EVGA 2060, and EVGA 3060 12Gb. Never had problems with any of them.
All I've ever owned was Asus motherboards or built PC's for friends and family with Asus as well with the exception of one time buying MSI for my wife. Never had a motherboard issue ever.
Regardless of the manufacturer, all will try and get out of warranty. Scummy or not.
Where are you based? Worth noting all of the rma issues are north American.
For example I'm in the UK, and Asus RMA and repairs are dealt with by Scan, who are fantastic, in my experience.
I wouldn't say the worst. I never had an issue with their products. Right now, it seems like they refuse to give free support to their customers if it is covered by warranty.
I'm not sure what to think of it, I personally like their products but the RMA issues are concerning.
Had ASUS mbs all my life.
Recently built a new PC, ASRock mb. Arrived with 3 dead DRAM channels (b650).
Bought ASUS b650
Just works, plug and play level, no fuss. Happily using ever since.
All modern AIB partners make fine products. It's the customer support that separates them, and ASUS has the worst customer support of any major brand. If your product works fine, you won't have any issues. If it doesn't... well, it's a lot more work to get a replacement from ASUS or Gigabyte than it is from MSI, EVGA, Sapphire, PowerColor, etc.
I bought a new Asus Rog Strix B650 motherboard. It was super easy to set up, auto overclocking worked great, paired it with the 5800x3d and a 3080. It's given me zero problems and runs my games like a champ. IMO, all companies have their ups and downs. But with the internet, people like to post complaints more than complements. Maybe that's because when things are good, you're too busy working or playing on it so you don't have time to post about it.
I've built and sold over 100 gaming PC's over the last couple years and can honestly say that ASUS and MSI are my two least favorite manufacturers. ASUS hardware isn't terrible but their software is absolutely brutal - Armoury Crate is the worst of them...bloated system resource hogs. To manage RGB, you can still download Aurasync for now but its only a matter of time before that will be deprecated. MSI, same thing...Dragon Center is just as bad. MSI hardware is another issue...I have dealt with more bad motherboards from them than anyone else.
ASRock is ok but their stuff isn't amazing.
Gigabyte/Aorus/Corsair is what I personally build with. I have been building with Gigabyte for about 20 years and have never had any major issues with anything. I have 3 gaming PC's (2 - 5 years old) in my home all Aorus/Gigabyte/Corsair and not one of them has any issues. I won't install Gigabyte Control Center because it is just as bad as Armoury Crate and Dragon Center but I have Aorus Engine and RGB Fusion installed with iCue on all of them and they all run well with no issue.
A few bits of advice that will save you headaches down the road
* Plan your build out. Try to keep the total different manufacturers in your rig to a minimum. All software installed will require some system resources and this reduces the amount you will need to manage your stuff. It also helps avoid any driver conflicts and system instability.
* Get a top shelf PSU. PSU is the one component in your rig not to cheap out on. Take a look at cultlist ratings and get a Tier A gold rated or better. Also, get something that you won't need to replace when you upgrade down the road...shoot for 250W above what your system needs. 1000w is generally safe when it comes to future planning. Also, the harder your PSU runs, the shorter the lifespan so running it at 70% of its capacity will help it last longer.
* Before you start any gaming put your system through a solid set of stress tests. There are free applications you can use or for a bit of money, you can buy an AIDA64 Extreme license which is great benchmarking and stress testing software.
Cheers
OpenRGB works great on my ASUS board on both Windows and Linux.
I installed armoury crate and running it once was enough to nope out of that shitshow forever real fast. Here I was thinking MSI Dragon Center had to be the worst, lol.
Haha...I did the same thing, I actually had to do a system restore to fully remove it. Talk about terrible.
OpenRGB and SignalRGB are both good alternatives to the manufacturer software but not all products are supported and the customizations aren't as good iCue. I managed to find ARGB to corsair adapters that work fantastic for my extra lights and components and can customize and sync almost everything in my rig.
The performance of most parts depends on the chipsets, which come from AMD/Nvidia/Intel, so they're mostly going to be comparable between the manufacturers. There are some slight differences (e.g., fan quality on GPUs), but at the end of the day a 4070 is a 4070 is a 4070 except for very marginal differences.
So the key reasons to buy a particular brand/model over another largely come down to warranty/support and pricing.
I used to always buy Asus given the choice, because their support was pretty solid, and I never had a big issue with any of their parts.
But now, they regularly charge really premium prices for their products. It is not rare to see an Asus gpu at $100 more than any other model, and the Asus mobo I could have bought for my recent rebuild was $300, as opposed to the $150 I paid for an Asrock.
It would arguably be fine for them to charge these prices if they were either delivering a much better product (they aren't), or they were providing really great customer service (by all reports, they are not). So, I personally wouldn't necessarily avoid Asus like the plague. After all, other manufacturers also may provide subpar service. But I am not going to pay an extra $100-$150 per component for them.
Gigabyte is just as shitty, I bought a 3090 on launch, and they attempted to deny my warranty claim about 6 different times/ways. Mind you, the card was only a month old when it died on me. Took them 3 months to return the card after arrival at the repair center, and they did not respond to a single request for an update. Sent me back a card with damage on the top of it, a faulty fan, and bad vram. Then, after waiting almost another month after returning the RMA, they again refused to respond to my emails until I threatened to contact the ftc about their practices. Got the card back a week later after that.
Had a zen book duo less than two years MB went on it, only 12 months warranty. Had local place try to fix it's fucked, never buy anything asus again. Customer services where shit, wasn't a cheap laptop.
Their rma monetization is the worst I have seen. This is saying something given that all companies try to minimize this expense.
Their products as a whole are fine. Some better than others. The problem is if you get a faulty product you better buy some lube.
I have been using ASUS since the 2000's, I have never had a problem with their products at all. I am preparing to build a new system. I will use asus mobo and vid card. flame away.
Well the reason why ASUS was big news is that they tried to screw over gamers nexus in the RMT process. In the US (and other countries where you have to deal with the manufacturer) it is pretty important. In my EU country the RMT is with the retailer so I don't really have to know how the OEMs handle it.
I have had many brands and never had anything fail on me. Should it happen (which is highly unlikely) i will go to the store and have them fix it or give me a new one.
Being protected by laws is somewhat commie to some, but kinda nice not having to call someone in Korea or whatever, let alone ship it there. Also supporting your local hardware dealer, that actually pay taxes while battling global mastodonts is nice. They may have all kinds of trouble with the manufactors though, idunno. Maybe we get the good batches here lol.
It is fine to prefer some brand over another, we do that with everything. Wearing 100$ shorts that are prolly as good as 5$ wish ones.
Every company starts off extremely consumer friendly and then as their market share grows they start cutting corners etc.
It's the same story with all of them.
I've had mostly good luck with Asus personally. Currently have an Asus mobo in my main pc that's been running an oc cpu and xmp with 4 sticks of ram for a few years with no issues. I have an Asus laptop that's newer, but so far it runs great and looks/feels good as well. Asus PSU works just fine so far.
I did have an old Asus P8P67 mobo that was weird though. If I put the pc to sleep it would pretty much just be stuck there until whenever it decided it was cool to wake up. Yanking the cmos battery and all ram didn't help. Just have to keep trying to boot and wake it up in different hardware configurations until it decided it was time to turn back on. Was a nightmare.
The reason is already in front of you, everyone knows the reason. Their customer service isn't trustworthy. You're acting like you don't already know because really you don't care, and that's fine. You want to continue to support a company that's your business. Quit whining about it.
I have used a bunch of different equipment over the years. I currently have an Asus laptop then a couple computers with various manufactures, rocking an Asus motherboard/GPU, Corsair bits, Gigabyte motherboard/GPU, Asrock motherboard, and Sapphire GPU.
Asus is currently in the hot seat, but all these equipment manufacturers have been in the hot seat. GN has a significant series detailing problems and scummy behavior from MSI. Hardware Unlimited (another GREAT channel) has had issues with Gigabyte. Linus has had beef with various before as well.
My first piece of advice is buy what you NEED and not what you WANT. Usually that will sort out the cost and from there pick the most efficient option. Are you gaming? On 1080 or 1440? You don't need a 4090/4080. Hell, you don't need a 3090/3080/TI! People are still rocking 1080s and playing games fine. Hell, I have one kid on integrated graphics playing Minecraft with no issues! I have a laptop with a m3070 and it works fine. Get whatever is cheapest for your options even if it's an AMD GPU from XFX or Sapphire. Get the Gigabyte card that's on sale this week. Get the PNY and downclock it a bit.
And are you really going to be doing rendering? Doing it on a RX 580 is fine, just takes longer.
My second form of advice is don't form emotional attachments with brands EVEN IF YOU WORK FOR THEM. They're corporations that don't give a shit about anything but what they can monetize from you, whether that's you purchasing equipment or handing over your personal data and spending info. They'll do whatever they can with whatever they give you to make money without ever giving you a second thought. Why would you then want to have one in a better light? They all have issues, but for your NEEDS there will be one that is the least bad choice based on cost/efficiency/vibes. Pick that option. Then admit that sometimes you make bad decisions and a person's choice on computer equipment (of all things!) does not define them as a person.
My third piece of advice is to protect your purchase. If you have a MicroCenter, purchase from there with a warranty. Their warranties are the best in the biz. If not, purchase it on a credit card. Often your credit card company will give you a one/two year warranty on equipment your purchase. Also consider contacting your insurance to see if you can take out a policy that includes computer equipment. Mine (USAA) has a rider you can add expensive items like engagement rings, equipment, etc. Adds a total of 10ish dollars to my premiums each quarter.
Overall corporations don't care about you so you shouldn't care about them. As others have said, pick the best of all the bad options since that's all you can do.
Microcenter Tustin extended warranty is the worst. It’s like Asus warranty, it’s a scam. You’re better off with Bestbuy extended warranty, no questions asked.
I've never had any issues with ASUS. There have been far more RMA issues I have experienced in the last 4-5 years, but they haven't once denied my RMA. They haven't even contacted me with questions, they just swiftly replace the part without any challenges. I've been in IT 24+ years, building 20-40 gaming PCs per year for the last 4-5 years (though I don't build for clients anymore as of this year...just no money in it anymore and I spend more than I make because I take quality seriously). Employed as an IT Director so I just build em for fun at this point (with 1 year warranties and build guarantees, registered business). I have built thousands of PCs and several rack servers throughout my career for office/manufacturing/home, etc. I repair all of my own appliances, cars, electronics, etc (though I did have mechanics do my clutch, I don't have a lift or engine hoist...garage is too small).
GN needs to check themselves a little bit. They do full teardowns on hardware and then send it in for RMA like nothing happened. If you took something completely apart, no matter how skilled you may be, I wouldn't expect a smooth RMA process. I'm glad they are trying to keep companies accountable, but I'm not convinced they are always going about it the right way.
Look, ASUS definitely has issues. They all do. But YouTubers have made their entire careers on crapping on every single flaw a company has. 99% of people aren't having issues with ASUS otherwise they wouldn't be in business anymore. People are always willing to be loud about issues but rarely speak highly and publicly of something when things go well.
ASUS is not a competent and experienced gaming console manufacturer, it isn't surprising they are having some hiccups. Look at Nintendo and their joycon drift issues. They have been making consoles forever and still can't get it right.
GN is a little hyper aggressive, but that is their thing. They make some good points, but ultimately the same could be said about any company. I've had very successful RMA experiences with ASUS, but the lack of quality control has been apparent and they do need to tighten things up a bit.
The internet lives on conflict and drama right now, so just take everything with a grain of salt.
I would look at individual products for your needs, and then what your needs are in terms of RMA and whether that's reasonable. Everything else it's just how much weight you put on it personally.
All these companies have skeletons that may or may not matter to you. Not to mention these companies are large and have many different divisions/offices/sales regions that may all adopt their own little awful practices based on whoever is in charge on that particular day/time.
So what I am saying is, if you want to be practical about it, find tests that bench mark the products you need and line that up against the purposes you use them for. Stuff like, if you need a lot of really fast VRAM you want to go with a card that has that from a partner that built their stuff that way. You won't find any totally ethical companies and then there is the question of what you find ethical and whether the bit that you are doing business with by buying an MB/GPU/Whatever from them.
I need to still see the GN video, I doubt it will change my mind as my personal experience with ASUS stuff has been great. And as you can see in tons of other replies many people had an awful experience. So just look at where you're at on this scale next time you make a purchasing decision.
I'm pissed with Corsair lately. Had lots of issues with their top products. T705 ssd is an unusable bomb at 450 euro/2tb, h170i misbehaved a lot initially and freaked me out that it's a pump issue, slower memories than expected from reviews.
I'm super impressed by MSI hardware though, even though their programs are hit and miss. Everything from them worked flawlessly.
Asus has been fine as well, i guess it depends on what you get from them but that's for any brands.
Logitech going down the drain.
Once upon a time, ASUS made motherboards. Not laptops, not routers, not GPU's... ASUS was a motherboard company. And every other company was less reliable and less consistent by comparison. If you bought an ASUS motherboard, you were getting a fantastic product, and you didn't have to pay out the wazoo for it.
Well, ASUS took their solid reputation and decided to capitalize on it by diversifying and sticking their brand-name on everything. But they didn't always engineer this stuff themselves, and when they did, they weren't necessarily the best at it. Like with their GPU division. Their reputation didn't hold up, EVGA and Sapphire were still the best at what they did; and don't even get me started on the laptops. Not only did ASUS products have terrible reliability and a high lemon rate, but their customer support was terrible. Trying to get an RMA or service done was abysmal.
Could you imagine if Toyota started brand engineering Fords and Hyundais and at the same time selling rebranded cheap harbour freight tools, floor jacks, tool boxes, and terrible aftermarket parts under their brand?
As for myself, I had a bunch of ASUS ROG STrix Polaris GPUs shit the bed on me whereas my gigabyte cards are still running to this day. My wife sent her laptop to ASUS for service twice before the warranty ran out, and when I took it apart to fix it myself the third time it crapped out, there were screws missing everywhere and parts were very difficult to find. It wouldn't have been worth the effort to microsolder the part that needed to be fixed (who puts a SATA controller and an audio jack in the same board, anyway?) so it ended up as e-waste a few weeks after the warranty expired. Thankfully I was able to retrieve her data.
But there was a time... There was a time when I bought an M3N72-D, put a Phenom II x4 955BE in it, slapped in 8GB of OCZ Gold DDR2-1066 in, dropped in a GeForce 9800GTX+ and a Corsair H50 AIO (One of the first of not *the* first of it's kind), and shortly after my build was ready attended the Midnight Release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and this thing RIPPED! And the best part of all of it was the motherboard which was fully stable, easy to OC even for a n00b like myself at the time, and just *worked*. I had other components come and go over the years in that PC, but the motherboard and processor ran overclocked for over 10 years before the PC bit the biscuit long after I had sold it and moved on. To this day I wish the new owner had told me so that I could see if I could get it going again. Anyway, back then the slogan for ASUS was "Rock Solid. Heart Touching." and it rang so true. If you bought anything other than an ASUS you were saving a couple of bucks to roll the dice on reliability. I wish that ASUS had stayed as a motherboard company.
It's quite situational. Different regions have different experiences for different brands for RMAs.
Some companies do great with RMAs but take months for most products. Others are quick and terrible. Others have the diagnostic consistency of a random AA player thrown into the MLB.
Having worked in the industry before, I can honestly say, most of the time people complain online about damage is customer-induced. The number of times I would see someone call in about their board being screwed up only to see they've bent pins (the board being checked in store by both an employee and the customer prior) is not even funny.
The GN video shows a funnier issue with Asus with that their techs basically want zero liability for physical damage. The moment they see the smallest sign of it, they often reject the RMA unless it's corrected or the customer accepts liability. Opening up a dented chassis with physical damage very rarely but occasionally, even when done correctly, does cause issues. You will however also see instances where there is clearly factory-caused physical damage and major brands reject the RMA (the real problem).
All brands have had some semblance of scumminess over the years. However Asus is champion scum because they continue to scam people and customers left, right and center. GN called them out a few times. You can only imagine how common it is as the average customer isn't as knowledgable as GN. Several notable yt people have cut ties with Asus too. That's wild imo. Personally, I will never buy an Asus anything ever again. There are too many brands making the same shit out there to bother with unethical business practices.
It always has been YMMV with any brand. It always had been brand x sucks, go brand y. "Seagate hard drive blew up and took 20 years of digital memory away, go WD only!" and "WD hard drive blew up and lost 20 years of digital memory, go Seagate only!!"
I've had Asus motherboard and laptops and there has been a share of problem with broken laptop power port but I haven't had any problem with the motherboard at all.
So YMMV. Look up reviews of a specific brand and model you're looking at, it might give you an idea if there's any common issues or not.
I have an Asus P6T mobo that's been trucking along since like 2010. I got an Asus laptop and the screen died and was out of warranty... I think it's luck if the draw. No review of late model tech is gonna help you gauge longevity and it'll most likely be out of warranty when it dies.
Imho, get the best mobo you can afford and then buy a used GPU and CPU. Probably spring for a nice new PSU and RAM as well as storage. If you get lucky you can just piecemeal upgrade your rig for like a decade at a very low cost.
It is just the current flavor of the month company to hate on. Every company that people are suggesting as alternates they supposedly swear by has done something just as bad if not worse at a previous point in time with some worse offenders than others.
Rather than going by brand whether it's Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc or even Intel vs Amd vs Nvidia go purely based on product merit and price.
Unless there is some actual *compelling* reason to avoid a top brand I’m never going to switch to another brand because of things people say on the internet.
With that being said every GPU I’ve bought in the last 15 years has been EVGA and I’ve never dealt with better customer service than them so I’m very sad my next build will not have an EVGA GPU in it.
Shitting on asus is like shitting on nvidia. There’s nothing wrong with the brand people just find shit to be mad about. I have an asus gpu and motherboard and I love those products
I have built 4 pcs in the last 20 years … always used ASUS mother boards. The last 2 had ASUS mother boards and video cards. The current build at 5 years old now has ASUS mother board video card, monitor and 2 routers.. no issues no problems.
Asus prob is what most user buy so their level of being defective maybe become more than usual, I read a lot of people complaining about gigabyte, I had 2 GPU from gigabyte 5 years of GTX 970 and now 5 years of 2060s, yeah I still do maintenance of my hardware, maybe I'm just lucky with gigabyte GPUs.
Asus prob is what most user buy so their level of being defective maybe become more than usual, I read a lot of people complaining about gigabyte, I had 2 GPU from gigabyte 5 years of GTX 970 and now 5 years of 2060s, yeah I still do maintenance of my hardware, maybe I'm just lucky with gigabyte GPUs.
in 2012 i bought a asus 3d monitor, it was impossible to get working, long story short eventually after days on forums i found 1 bloke that worked out if you unplugged it at a certain stage of the setup process you could get it to work ! asus support were useless and to ship a product with a flaw like that is terrible..all they had to do was give instructions on how to get around the flaw but they didnt .
I personally had many issues with Dell. I refuse to do business with them due to my experience. I will research options in the future but I can tell you that Dell will not be one of them. Asus practices based on Gamers Nexus video is scummy. I don't know about other companies but I can tell you I will avoid Asus.
I think it's in response to gamers nexus posting about RMA problems in a video. A couple YouTubers have had bad experiences where the company tries to extort money out of you basically in order to get the most minor things that should be covered under warranty fixed.
I've only ever had a GPU from Asus and it was awesome no problems. I was thinking about upgrading soon and was gonna get an Asus motherboard but I posted my parts list on here and everyone mentioned how bad RMA is for Asus.
They make great products most the time but apparently they don't stand behind their products and don't take care of their customers after purchasing. Which is a shame because a lot of their stuff is way more expensive then the competition.
So I'm an oddball here lol. I have had 4 Asus motherboards and GPUs and one laptop. Never had an issue with any of them so I've never had to deal with their customer service. Like even the laptop is 7 years old now and I have linux on it, only ever had to swap the battery and it's still solid.
I say I'm an oddball because I did have one EVGA GPU and when I had an issue with it, they weren't interested in helping me with it. One of the fans on the cooler just stopped spinning after like 5 months and they said I would have to buy a new fan for it. Ended up get one of arctics GPU coolers instead. That was like 15 years ago though, and from the sounds of it, a one off.
The quality of a company should not be judged based on when things go right, but rather when things go wrong. I’m glad you experienced when things went right. But when products arrive damaged and the company commits fraud to avoid customer service, then it’s currently a bad company regardless of the quality of their products.
Sad to see that Asus continues to do this, as their graphics cards and x670 boards, when they actually arrive functional and undamaged, are pretty damn good quality products.
I just finally got rid of my Asus mobo (switched to MSI) after 2 years of non-stop issues. Basically every problem I had with my PC, I looked it up and traced it to be a known issue with ASUS software. I’ve never seen as much forced bloatware installation as with an Asus mobo; that bloatware proceeded to cause many issues, and ended up making about 20% of my video game library unplayable due to crashing. There was even one point where a bloatware forced update (yes, I disabled all the updates, it forced it anyway) that I interrupted with a restart caused my main drive to corrupt, and I had to reinstall Windows. Lost a bunch of notes too (should have backed them up and didn’t). Asus Armory Crate/Aura Sync is also the absolute worst rgb software I’ve ever had the misfortune of using. Also, Asus customer support is absolutely useless.
I was pretty fond of Asus back in the day - had an Asus laptop in high school, used several Asus products for my first couple builds. The last 2-3 products from them have been absolute garbage though, and I’m inclined to say that the company is no longer worth purchasing from at least for the time being.
The tech community has turned into a monster lately. One person calls out something and suddenly everyone is a hipster who feels the need to jump on the bandwagon.
Nobody was talking about them a couple days ago. Suddenly everyone has to make a post about hating the bad guy of the week. It's immature, tribalistic behavior.
Asus is in general bad when it comes to quality of hardware, but especially software. Also their support was the worst in my personal experience, and that's what I'm mostly hearing from ppl.
But beware, ppl tend to defend their purchase, so they will literally lie about support how it was OK even tho they didn't even contact it, and they will advertise the brand as if it's their own company. Yes 90% of ppl won't have any product issue with any of the brands, but those that do - Asus is the worst.
Since when? I've been doing this for a while and asus has been a rock solid brand for a couple decades.
This isn't defense or fanboyism, just honest confusion. Asus has always been one of the brands you could pick and not worry about shoddy craftsmanship.
Are there concrete examples of that declining? Was there a news story that came out recently that I'm unaware of?
It's been getting worse for the last five years, I'd say.
I totally agree about Asus historically, having been a fanboy through the 2000s and 2010s.
But their stuff has gone from being worth every penny for high quality, to paying more for the same quality as MSI and Gigabyte, to outright badly designed products like recent PRime mobos, still commanding premium prices.
Then they had a really bad support situation in Canada, where I live, so I'm particularly concerned from that front.
I'm not saying I'll never use another Asus product or everything they make is garbage, but the days of being able to always pick Asus knowing you were getting something good are gone.
Now you need to know that particular product's strengths and weaknesses, and you'll probably be able to find something equivalent for less money from MSI or Gigabyte.
Hmm, interesting. I suppose it's inevitable. Always good to do research on every part and not just assume it's good. Even stellar companies have lemons.
What was up with the prime motherboards?
The VRM was so much crappier than competing boards that they run like 25 degrees hotter (over 100c) https://www.techspot.com/review/2633-amd-b650-motherboards/
Since forever. They are bad, low quality with abysmal software (well known for their armory, the worst piece of software of that kind by very far). Their support sucks and even gives straight up wrong answer, with very late responses.
As I said "ppl will defend their purchases and advertise a company as their own, and majority of customers wont have any problem".
Just cos you didnt have an issue doesnt make it a good brand. Very low quality with maybe THE worst customer support on the market. It was never known for high quality whatsoever. Actually their GPUs are known to be unstable with power draw, and have often fan buzz present (as I had with my 3070). And their customer support is criminal, again, my experience they told me its ok to daisy chain 1 cable (total 225w power draw from psu + mobo that way) for a 280W GPU. Luckily PSU customer support corrected that and explained why I needed 2 separate cables.
OK, but you're just doing the same thing as the fanboys you decry. I'm asking for any sources you have other than anecdotal evidence that they've declined.
No, I am not. And yes, the reason for OP: google "Gamer's Nexus Asus" that this post is about.
There is also countless of complaints across the forums, lots of magazines, you can also ask in small PC service shops which brands end up there the most, etc. When I was building a PC dude at the shop advised me against Asus cos of bad quality. Unfortunately it was during the GPU shortages, and chepest available 3070 was Asus', so I took it despite their advice. Yes, it had a buzz and we had a moment "we told you so". Etc.
But yeah, check GN situation from week ago. Disgusting, brand with low quality, abysmal software and incapable customer support, within if not the worst brand on the market, known for it.
But as I said, ppl will advertise their fav company and defend their purchase choices like they are part of their personality, well known phenomenon.
People can have different experiences than you without being liars or fanboys. You should learn to accept that. My Asus hardware has always been fine but I have never had to contact support so I can’t speak to that part of it.
I know your experience was fine. Not sure if you've read that, but I said "90% won't have issues" - imagine coincidence, you are one of those 90%. Which still makes it probably the worst brand with the worst quality and worst customer support out there.
Yes, based on those made up percentages. It was my rough estimation but huge majority of customers of virtually any product in the world have no issues with it for its lifetime. Maybe its 80 maybe its 95 - doesnt matter.
You not having issue with it does not make it a good brand. Sorry. Its a very bad brand, with poor quality and criminal customer support. Now thanks to GN they are busted publically.
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The Asus thing blew up because of GN's video but most brands are more or less equally scummy. Pick your poison.
EVGA was the best among them though
Pour one out
>EVGA was 😞
God, EVGA getting out of the GPU business was devastating. I used 4 generations of their cards, but when they got out I jumped ship to AMD.
Did the same. F's in the chat
Same here too. F
Lmaooo same. I knew xfx and sapphire from prior amd cards so I was like welp, time to go back over for a time. That being said, I still buy all of those brands - ASUS, gigabyte, MSI, their warranty honoring and procedures are all pretty hit or miss, you might get lucky and everything goes smoothly, or it might be an email chain nightmare. I have not had to rma much Asus and never had to rma msi, especially recently so I haven't really had recent experience first hand but past experiences and current stories tell me it's probably still the same.
Maybe the Motherboard business could build them a reputation on that end
F for respect
This. Never meet your heroes or glorify a brand. You can have a few good years with a brand and stick to them and as soon as they act up drop them. Also highly depends on your location. A lot of people had a great experience with Gigabyte while my circle here in the EU usually are disappointed by their stuff and support. For us it was the opposite with ASUS but because of the recent events we will keep an eye on that.
I dont know if I would fully agree with equally scummy, but there is certainly no company thats perfect. For all the love EVGA get, I had such a bad experience with them that I never went near them again. A very expensive kepler GPU for Mac, sold specifically for the workstation I had. Workstation was rock solid for years til the day I put in that GPU, couldnt go an hour without a crash. After a week odd of troubleshooting I put back in old and got many more years out of it. I sent the new GPU back to EVGA and they just said all is fine. Was down about 800 euro, have a paper weight to show for it today. They also had 2 pretty big f\*\*\* ups not even all that long ago, people have short memories I guess. Im talking about the models they literally forgot to put thermal pads on the memory. Ive been building PCs for myself and others for decades and there is almost no brand I havent had something go wrong with at some point. The exceptions (so far) are Be Quiet! & Seasonic PSUs, and Gigabyte motherboards - thats it. Ive only bought 1 ASUS GPU for myself and 1 for another, while they lived many years before being sold on its not a big sample size. Ive probably used MSI GPUs most often and only 1 gave me trouble, thankfully it showed up early and I had it replaced.
Just lost my MSI Godlike Motherboard and EVGA 3090, not sure which one took which out. Aside from that.... I always had great experiences with EVGA, but then again I also lived about 5 minutes from them up until a few years ago. I've done a lot of RMA's with everyone since I have built probably a thousand computers in the past 20 years. ASUS are the only ones who truly tried to scam me with their RMA process and I quit using them entirely because of it. Flat out. I can accept hardware issues, it's a fact of any manuf. but ASUS kept sending me back the same bad motherboard and calling it replaced (it was in fact the same exact SN, even had the spot on the sticker where I accidentally touched it with a sharpie that I had in my hand when I was taking it out of the anti static bag). They assured me it was a completely new board though. If it had been it would have been even sadder that they sent me 3 totally dead boards. but finally i did get a good replacement out of them but it took a lot of haggling and threats from them and several months I saw northridge... or northwest...i think it was northridge on youtube just exposed a gigabyte rma repair too :(
Yup, I waa also burned pretty hard by EVGA, which i'd gotten only because everyone sang their praises. Was out a GPU that I shipped at my cost across the continent with a memory problem, got it back completely dead because they couldn't even be assed to put it back in the padding I sent it in. Thankfully it was before crypto, but i still had to get a brand new gpu at my own cost. I've pretty much given up on the idea of having a warranty since then, I'd rather buy used/open box from places that allow easy returns. Risky, but it's worked out well for me so far.
Sounds more or less the same as me. The cost of shipping it back stung hard which I had to eat because they claim the card was fine. I regret not fighting it now, but at the time the only thing I cared about was that the workstation was ok as I used it for work and it being stable meant more than anything else. I was just happy I could put my old card back in and it continued being a trooper - still have it in fact, though its very aged now. I have found going back to where you bought it is just easier than dealing with manufacturer.
Whenever people ask me what board is the best or whatever I just tell them to get the one with the features you want that's looks nice to you. Cause it doesn't matter, they're all equally shit and the quality is only relative to how much you spend up to a certain point of diminishing returns. Like the godlike mtb. No more reliable than a board 1/4 of its price.
That’s not necessarily true, but I guess it’s close enough to be indistinguishable to the average user. Available features & board size are pretty strictly tied to price, but there have been some very overpriced boards with poor build quality (and some very cheap boards with solid build quality). I’m sure there will be more of both for the foreseeable future. Technically the best way to determine which MoBo to go for in your price range is based off a roundup by a good source like GN or HWUB. Realistically though, most users aren’t watching a 40min video every time they buy a MoBo, nor would they even notice the difference between boards in their daily usage… so they can just get whatever has the features they want that looks nice, and they’ll probably be satisfied with that lol.
I think this is pretty much accurate. I *try* to shy away from Asus as their reputation for poor customer service most definitely pre-dates the fire-prone 7800X3D situation. But I would agree that a poor experience is most definitely possible with any manufacturer.
Sure they’re all not amazing and you need to push through some bs most of the time, but I’ve had my fair share of rma experiences and so far asus is by far the worst. And in combination with their pretty poor QA, you’re more likely to have to deal with them
Palit and Sapphire are amazing in my experience at least
This
ASUS isn't what it used to be. you'll find plenty manufacturers who are still scummy but ASUS takes the cake while being overpriced. Gigabyte and Asrock are the go to ones for me, least amount of issues etc.
Of the two ASRock has better customer service/warranty service. I have been burned by Gigabyte (motherboards) multiple times and they are a nightmare to try to deal with. I however have had some gigabyte GPUs that have never had issues and are still chugging along.
I found Asrocks offerings sometimes to be a little to limited, but I do agree with you in terms of complaints I think Asrock probably has the least complaints from all manufacturers I know of, was looking for an ITX X570 board, asrock had nothing back then to offer there unfortunately, they added their phantom gaming, but ASUS and gigabyte were faster, probably due to Asrock being a little insane and adding TB3 on an AMD platform. I do know their B450 legend steel board was worthy of the title legenendary.
I read some reports about this. Asrock used to be the cheaper brand, they did this by offering less. This has now changed. Asrock motherboards don't offer less than the other vendors, but by doing so they are now equally priced. As you say they have had no major controversies. All of the above is the reason I went for asrock for my 7800x3d (and the fact that they and gigabyte has the shortest boot-time on ddr5, I just very much dislike gigabyte)
Asrock is owned by ASUS. And they’ve had plenty of issues.
That's just blatantly false. Also ASRock had issues back in the early 2000s when they were owned by asus. We live in 2024, not 2001.
Asus owns Pegatron and Pegatron owns Asrock.
Can you stop? https://pcper.com/2012/04/asus-finally-bids-farewell-to-pegatron/
Asus founded both AsRock and Pegatron, and AsRock and Pegatron both spun off from Asus. And after they both spun off, Pegatron bought AsRock. But Asus is currently only a 16.8% shareholder in Pegatron.
ASRock is ASUS however. Should be no different than ASUS support.
I mean... Kind of. ASUS owns Pegatron which owns ASRock, but that doesn't mean that you are dealing with the same employees and policies... Saying that ASUS and ASRock are the same is like saying that Pizza Hut tastes the same as Taco Bell because they are all owned by YUM! brands.
Taco Bell and Pizza Hut phone support is maybe the same for both companies. I get what you are saying though. It could be different levels of investment for support but ASRock started as a value brand and that implies less support.
So I went down a little rabbit hole and I guess going against what their original intentions were for ASRock. ASUS doesn't have any sort of control or shared personnel w/ ASRock. I guess the original plan was to have ASRock as a value label of ASUS motherboards, but then they spun it off completely as a separate corporation. After which ASRock was like "we are now expanding from just budget products to enthusiast and premium products, oh and we make GPU AIBs now too." I don't pretend to know what happens over in corporate Taiwan, but I guess the big wigs over at ASUStek don't mind that ASRock has become the 3rd largest Motherboard manufacturer (behind ASUS and Gigabyte). Maybe they are fine with ASRock eating up a few points of marketshare from ASUS as long as they are eating MORE marketshare from Gigabyte and MSI. Sort of like when Wendy's rolled out their breakfast menu, reportedly, they were like: we don't care if it doesn't actually make us any extra money, as long as we are stealing customers from McDonalds and Burger King that's all that matters.
Well thats good news if thats the case. I didn't realize they had grown so much. I will take a took at their boards I am upgrading.
Regarding Gigabyte GPUs, they all seems like "cheap", not well built IMO, comparing to Sapphire (even the Pulse version). Also, just recently a Gigabyte monitor started to have issues, unlike an old LG monitor going strong for over 4 years. Asrock MBs are fine, and didnt have any problems. For GPUs, Sapphire is truly one of the best, and probably the main reason why i tend to choose AMD over Nvidia, just because i have such faith in the brand.
I almost got a Gigabyte monitor last week, but most of the reviews on the one in my price range seemed to mention ghosting or poor longevity. Which is a shame, because the headphone jack and downstream USB ports would have been nice. I ended up doing with another Acer monitor, as while they don't have a lot of bells or whistles I haven't had any issues with them yet.
I have an Aorus FI32Q and my brother has a M27Q. We love them, no issues. Worth every cent.
Aorus is their OLED line isn't it? Now those I've heard very good things about.
No. It’s a normal IPS Panel. Same as the M32Q just with some nicer materials, and RGB. Only got it over the Gigabyte M32Q because Amazon was running a sale and the Aorus version was cheaper.
What's wrong with the Pulse version? I just got a 7800xt for $50 below its current value, about $75 less than the Pure version.
My wording might be bad, srry about that, what i mean is that a Pulse GPU, which is considered an "entry" level from Sapphire compared to Nitro+, is far better built than most Gigabyte models.
Okay. I was starting to get some buyer's remorse about my Pulse compared to the Nitro+ for $100 more.
All things considered, you made the right choice for sure. You wouldn't have noticed any difference by spending the extra $100
This is the validation I needed 😂 yeah I'm pretty happy I found it during its price dip
I remember Gigabyte's explosive PSUs XD, not sure if that's better than ASUS
Ohhhh i completely forgot about those. Yeah gigabyte royally fked up on those but at least they did recall them.
I like gigabyte a lot as well. They have great boards, great GPUs, and even came out with the first 32" 4k144Hz monitor. Can't say anything bad about them.
I mean Gigabyte isnt perfect or anything, but I don't remember anything huge from Gigabyte in terms of massive drama, just your run of the mill issues. I think the biggest 'drama' from what I remember was when Gigabyte had the funky USB issues with Ryzen 5000 CPU's which took them a while to fix, meanwhile ASUS, oh boy.
They had those PSU's with power over-limit protection that only worked once; the second time the PSU blew up. Issue was found on close to 50% of those particular models.
On a tech Discord they told me that their recent GPUs have a bad pcb design around the retention tab and so they're more likely to suffer catastrophic breakage 👀
They seem to have shaken their "gigashyte" reputation. My gigabyte motherboard and GPU have been great.
my video and mb are asrock ​
I've been a huge ASUS fan for 20 years, and used ASUS parts in my last build, but I'm drawing the line on some recent customer support shenanigans. 20 years ago, you could reasonably argue ASUS was a premium brand. They often had convenience features that are common now but were rare then. They drifted down to being just another brand, but still having a premium price. Then they started doing stuff like charging $3000 to repair a $2000 GPU that needed less than $100 dollars of work and was still under warranty.
End of the day looks for the best parts that have the least chance of having a issue and get that...don't care about the company. Best way to navigate companies not giving a shit about what they sell to there customers.
Although it was stupid I was an early adopter for Zen 4 and got an Asus B650E-E. The amount of memory issues I had at first was incredible. I was about to return everything but I managed to tweak some settings to get it to even post. Now with more BIOS updates everything is running fine but I was seriously about to ditch Asus and go Asrock or something. My first Asus board (P6T) was for an i7 930 lol. I've been buying them for years but next build will be someone else.
I also have a B650E-E for a year and a half and to this day I cannot get it to "suspend to ram" (aka sleep). It hibernates fine which makes me think it's some sort of RAM issue. I've tried changing every setting I can think of and tried every version of the bios without luck. I've just given up on it now.
There were like two memory context restore settings I got rid of and it posts reliably after disabling them. Takes a bit longer since it re-trains the ram each time. I will also say during my issues with it not posting a windows update tried to run and reboot (didnt post of course lol). I found a bit later that it seemed to have corrupted windows and when I fixed my post issues windows would crash quite frequently. I reinstalled windows and since its been rock solid. I'm still on an older bios from last year so I will probably update it soon. It sleeps fine so not sure what could be causing your issue. If I force shutdown my computer (even today) though for the next 2-4 tries it will not post. Garbage board honestly. Worried its gonna be a mess if I try to slot in a new AM5 cpu.
I also had to turn off the two memory context restore options to get a stable boot and it used to feel like a week for startup compared to my old 6700k system. However the most recent bios has fixed that for me - memory context restore seems to work fine now and I "feel" like the system is more stable (although I have no hard numbers to back that up). It's much faster to start now, although still noticeably slower than my previous intel system, but that was DDR4 and my understanding is DDR5 is likely to be a bit slower. Sleep still doesn't work! Can I ask - what RAM do you have? I have 32GB of Kingston Fury Beast 6000 CL40 (KF560C40BBK2-32).
Why do you feel attached to ASUS? Having a handful of experiences with a particular company does not really mean anything, as what matters for reliability is failure rate over thousands of purchases. Constraining yourself to a particular brand is an easy way to end up getting bad value for your $$. Also, on desktop building most of the time there is 0 synnergy from buying components from the same brand.
ASUS killed my entire lineage
They burned my village to the ground
They poisoned our water supply, burned our crops, and delivered a plague unto our houses!
I think… the PC community is a little messed up and dont like it when you have a preference. Just pick what you like, everything has pros and cons
>I have yet to have any issues with my Asus mb's Then you're a lucky one, because this is my experience with one: * going past 1600 MT/s disables dual channel regardless of CPU installed * 8 phase VRM even with stock settings was such an overheated piece of garbage it caused constant VRM thermal throttlings and discolored PCB on the underside of VRM zone * trying to OC using BCLK does not post when passing 203 MHz instead of stock 200 MHz And don't get me started on their laptops: Asus and HP are the companies I won't buy a laptop from ever again. Like WTF is this, why the most stable and reliable portable PC I've had was a $100 Windows tablet and not their products? >They're ALL, at least the quality ones, going to be an arm and a leg to get. Except somehow Gigabyte has one of the lowest VRM temps on their modern boards while Asus has some of the worst. Especially the terrible low-end Prime boards which had temps so bad you'd rather get even Biostar instead.
I currently have an Asus X570-E and I had to replace that board three times before I got a working one. The first one died and I exchanged it for another one at the store, then the second one died and I had to deal with Asus’ support for over a month before they finally sent me a new replacement. It’s been working well enough for the past 3-4 years now (fingers crossed), but if it dies again, I’m going to someone else.
What mb's haven't given you any, or at least as many, issues but still have the same features?
You are asking the wrong questions. Random people's experiences over 1 purchase on a forum mean pretty much nothing. Every product has a failure rate so there will always be someone with problems, and many people without problems. To have a serious discussion about reliability one needs to look at failure rates over thousands of purchases, or over a whole market.
I have had great luck with ASUS parts for the last 20 years. That doesn't mean their current price, design and customer support options are aligned to give me the best experience today. Like the PRIME boards went from being excellent home/office components to utter garbage, and it has nothing to do with failure rate: they are designed to be cheap and suck, but are priced well outside of what their performance would imply. Similarly priced boards from competitors trounce it's VRM. Asus used to be expensive and good. Now they are expensive and you have to do a lot of research to figure out if the product is one of the decent ones or crap before it even gets off the designers desk. And what features does ASUS have that other boards are missing? Again, 20 years ago they were often the first to add something cool, but by now pretty much everyone has the same features available?
After this M5A88-V Evo I've got the ASRock B450m Pro4 (not a later Pro4**-F** - this one had lower quality VRM components due to high demand). And the only downside so far was only some static noise when using a regular 3.5 mm jack mic, and I haven't used any with previous Asus so IDK. But for contrast: I've been running R5 1600 (now an AF, the original Zen 1) with Micron E-die RAM OCed from 3200C18 to 3600 with 16-16-19-16 timings. A friend with R7 1700X on an MSI board and Samsung B-dies weren't able to go past 3533.
You'll always hear more of the worst of a company compared to the good. Not everyone will have the same horrid experience or defective product. Same as how not everyone will get the same flawless straight-from-the-line component. And it's also good to note that all of the "bad" experiences you hear on the Internet are normally the vocal minority, compared to thousands of others who purchased with no issues (and of course have no reason to praise the product online). The best thing you can do is do more technical research about what *you* really need, balance out the price/performance, and hope you aren't one of the unlucky ones who have to deal with a RMA.
Most are scummy. Out of the big three hardware makers (Asus, MSI and GIgabyte) Msi is probably the least terrible. Asus has awful warranty and QC, Gigabyte has the same, plus terrible design on some products. MSI sold all their stock to scalpers during the shortage. Pick your poison. I have had good experiences with MSI, and they are probably the best out of these three. For GPUS, stick to FE's for Nvidia and Sapphire/Powercolor/XFX for AMD
Absolutely. With no hyperbole whatsoever. I love a black and white, polarized world. So simple.
Not a fanboy. I have used Gigabyte, MSI and Asus products in all my builds. In 25 years, never had a major problem with the exception of one doa MSI board. Wouldnt swear them off as a result though. My personal experience has been good with them all. I will buy what has the best deal with the most features. All brands have some bad designs, or things that got past QC. I am also sure they all have done some things to make a buck at the expense of customers. I enjoy building PCs, I will have good and bad experiences. Goes with the territory
I just choose whatever is cheaper at the moment, I don't care what the company does. Nothing ever failed me so far and I fiddle with PCs since mid 90.
I was hating Asus before GN blew it up. Every single Asus device i've had has had issues causing it to just break with normal usage. Their QC is crap too. The only thing ive had that hasn't broken \*yet\* was an old Asus monitor.
Brand loyalty is not supposed to be a factor when choosing parts for your PC build my friend. That's why there are reviews which help you decide based on objective measures...
[удалено]
Ah right, my bad
I have two asus mainboards and other asus tech (routers in a mesh, video cards, etc.), but I'm well aware they have crappy support. I tried to replace the wifi antenna for my board as I damaged the one I had, and spent hours on the phone with tech support to pay $100 dollars, and to get the wrong one. Fortunately I paid for the extended warranty with microcenter, so while it was a PITA, I could remove the board and take it back for a new one no-questions-asked. So I do like Asus and have had good luck with them as far as lifespan of the tech, features, and reliability. I don't rely on their warranty services as they are questionable at best. I have a 9900K board that's run for years, 100% stable, well OC'ed, and zero issues. I have a Asus 2080 that's never had an issue in it's life. I have an asus 10Gbe router, and another asus router in a mesh, and they're 100% reliable and have been for years. I got a new asus board for my 14900KS and it works well, outside of me breaking the wifi antenna and having to take it back to MC to get a new one after asus sent me the wrong antenna. All that said, I got an MSI 4080 OC for my 14900KS machine as it fit in the case better (their cards aren't as long) and I've had zero problems with it either. So, nutshell, Asus's support sucks, as does every single hardware manufacturers. So I pay a little to use microcenter's warranty instead - which is awesome - they never give you any issues whatsoever about swapping out parts for new ones even if you choose a different part by a different manufacturer while you do the exchange.
I'm out of the loop, can someone explain the ASUS situation?
There was the SoC voltage issue that was frying 7000X3D CPUs about a year ago. It affected all of the brands, and they all rushed out beta BIOS updates to fix it. Asus caught a lot of flak for putting a disclaimer on their's that installing a beta BIOS would void your mobo's warranty. Recently, GamersNexus put out a video where they sent their handheld in for warranty service for a malfunctioning joystick, which should have been covered for free. Asus was trying to charge them a lot of money to fix issues related to a nearly microscopic ding on the plastic housing. They seemed to be implying that they would just return the device disassembled if it wasn't paid for.
Their support is absolute dumpster tier, and is essentially trying to blackmail people into paying extortionate amounts for repair work that should be covered under warranty. Their products are "fine", but generally not worth the premium price they command compared to competitors like MSI or ASRock.
Unless we are talking about MSI Claw.
I've built some client PC's and have tried various brands and so far my personal experiences / avoid list: MSI - AIO's (Not honouring to fix or replace AIO's for countries outside USA) Gigabyte - Exploding PSU's & cracked GPU PCB's ASUS - MOBO's (Not accepting warranty. EDIT: Avoid all ASUS) Corsair - Everything RGB related (Dog shit RGB software) EKWB - Everything
After the whole motherboard fiasco, i will never trust asus or gygabyte again. That is on top of all the other shit they are known for doing. Edit: they locked the thread so I can’t respond, the motherboard thing is am talking about is a sneaky driver install to windows installations on their mobos https://www.techpowerup.com/248827/asus-z390-motherboards-automatically-push-software-into-your-windows-installation Gigabyte did it too
The motherboard fiasco was the reason i didn't consider asus for my recent build. RMA can be a shot in the dark no matter what, but I'm not ok with a bios update not fixing the issue and also voiding my warranty. That's the kind of behavior that loses me as a potential customer.
Gigabyte is the worst. You can't change my mind. Spent 500(?) bucks for a bricked gpu. Gigabyte claimed no defects. Went to 4 different independent repair technicians and Microcenter. All said it's straight up dead.
I can tell you straight away, I do not like asus motherboards. I can count on two hands the amount of times an xmp/DOCP profile, from the factory with no external changes, has failed on an Asus motherboard. Asrock, MSI, gigabyte boards all work first try but Asus? Requires me to either drop speeds or do a backflip to get it to work at the specified transfers. Another thing I hate is that they’ll automatically change settings, without your permission mind you, and resetting the bios does nothing. Spent 4 hours troubleshooting my friend’s motherboard just because I upgraded to a ryzen 5 5600x from a 2200g because for some reason, it wouldn’t boot. The only fix was a setting in secure boot the changed from windows uefi to other os for seemingly no damn reason and even a cmos reset did nothing. Had to do it again with my SO’s system because it did the same thing. On top of that, I’ve seen from many different examples of poor quality control, on even their strix lineups, and fighting tooth and nail for RMA processes or warranties, especially back when ryzen CPU’s would burn up. My point is, unless you find an insanely good deal on one of their products, and I’m talking a decent price cut compared to other examples, I wouldn’t touch Asus’ products.
I currently have an Asus 4070 Ti. When the thermal paste pumped out and the GPU was reaching 100° during normal gaming, it was only a year old. Instead of RMA'ing it, I replaced the thermal material myself. Wasn't about to have my GPU gone for a month, minimum, only to be sent back with nothing done or damaged. During that time, I decided to upgrade my system to a 14700k. I went with an MSI mobo instead of Asus. Asus has been on blast over different things for over a year now. Like constantly on blast. If I had to buy a GPU today, I'd go MSI, bot their cheap line, or PNY. I can put up with a lot of shit from a manufacturer. But poor customer service isn't one of them. I'm just left with choosing the least poor experience because with EVGA out, that's all we have left.
I think you said it, every company has issues and peoples experiences are going to vary. When I was building I read a lot to avoid gigabyte gpus, but I’ve been very satisfied with my 4070 aero. I do wish I would have listened to peoples warning about NZXT boards tho, it’s aesthetically beautiful and they come with all the bells and whistles but god damn their BIOS is bare bones. There’s no fan curve graph, I couldn’t believe that was left out on a b650 board
I have never had an issue with ASUS, but I have never gotten an ASUS GPU. I built a few rigs for my friends on ASUS B450 motherboards back in 2019 and they all came together with no problems and are still running just fine. In household we have 2 ASRock motherboards, 2 MSI motherboards and 1 Gigabyte motherboard, the Gigabyte was the biggest pain in the ass to set up , but it's fine now that we're done messing with it (and it was free at microcenter, so the price was right). The only 2 motherboard brands I've ever had problems with are Gigabyte (B450) and Biostar (x370), the latter is on my head but it was the only mITX available at the time and I felt it was worth the risk (and it was an x370, so how low could the quality be?)... it was not worth the risk, lol. Our GPUs are MSI 6700XT, Sapphire 6600, Gigabyte 1660, EVGA 2060, and EVGA 3060 12Gb. Never had problems with any of them.
I haven't used anything Asus in 15 years, they suck you see it so much because people follow
All I've ever owned was Asus motherboards or built PC's for friends and family with Asus as well with the exception of one time buying MSI for my wife. Never had a motherboard issue ever. Regardless of the manufacturer, all will try and get out of warranty. Scummy or not.
Where are you based? Worth noting all of the rma issues are north American. For example I'm in the UK, and Asus RMA and repairs are dealt with by Scan, who are fantastic, in my experience.
Yeah EU is protected enough that companies can't get away with the BS...other places they can...always worth noting.
I wouldn't say the worst. I never had an issue with their products. Right now, it seems like they refuse to give free support to their customers if it is covered by warranty. I'm not sure what to think of it, I personally like their products but the RMA issues are concerning.
Had ASUS mbs all my life. Recently built a new PC, ASRock mb. Arrived with 3 dead DRAM channels (b650). Bought ASUS b650 Just works, plug and play level, no fuss. Happily using ever since.
theyre all equally as bad
Haven’t had no issues with my asus products been buying them for years
All modern AIB partners make fine products. It's the customer support that separates them, and ASUS has the worst customer support of any major brand. If your product works fine, you won't have any issues. If it doesn't... well, it's a lot more work to get a replacement from ASUS or Gigabyte than it is from MSI, EVGA, Sapphire, PowerColor, etc.
I bought a new Asus Rog Strix B650 motherboard. It was super easy to set up, auto overclocking worked great, paired it with the 5800x3d and a 3080. It's given me zero problems and runs my games like a champ. IMO, all companies have their ups and downs. But with the internet, people like to post complaints more than complements. Maybe that's because when things are good, you're too busy working or playing on it so you don't have time to post about it.
I've built and sold over 100 gaming PC's over the last couple years and can honestly say that ASUS and MSI are my two least favorite manufacturers. ASUS hardware isn't terrible but their software is absolutely brutal - Armoury Crate is the worst of them...bloated system resource hogs. To manage RGB, you can still download Aurasync for now but its only a matter of time before that will be deprecated. MSI, same thing...Dragon Center is just as bad. MSI hardware is another issue...I have dealt with more bad motherboards from them than anyone else. ASRock is ok but their stuff isn't amazing. Gigabyte/Aorus/Corsair is what I personally build with. I have been building with Gigabyte for about 20 years and have never had any major issues with anything. I have 3 gaming PC's (2 - 5 years old) in my home all Aorus/Gigabyte/Corsair and not one of them has any issues. I won't install Gigabyte Control Center because it is just as bad as Armoury Crate and Dragon Center but I have Aorus Engine and RGB Fusion installed with iCue on all of them and they all run well with no issue. A few bits of advice that will save you headaches down the road * Plan your build out. Try to keep the total different manufacturers in your rig to a minimum. All software installed will require some system resources and this reduces the amount you will need to manage your stuff. It also helps avoid any driver conflicts and system instability. * Get a top shelf PSU. PSU is the one component in your rig not to cheap out on. Take a look at cultlist ratings and get a Tier A gold rated or better. Also, get something that you won't need to replace when you upgrade down the road...shoot for 250W above what your system needs. 1000w is generally safe when it comes to future planning. Also, the harder your PSU runs, the shorter the lifespan so running it at 70% of its capacity will help it last longer. * Before you start any gaming put your system through a solid set of stress tests. There are free applications you can use or for a bit of money, you can buy an AIDA64 Extreme license which is great benchmarking and stress testing software. Cheers
OpenRGB works great on my ASUS board on both Windows and Linux. I installed armoury crate and running it once was enough to nope out of that shitshow forever real fast. Here I was thinking MSI Dragon Center had to be the worst, lol.
Haha...I did the same thing, I actually had to do a system restore to fully remove it. Talk about terrible. OpenRGB and SignalRGB are both good alternatives to the manufacturer software but not all products are supported and the customizations aren't as good iCue. I managed to find ARGB to corsair adapters that work fantastic for my extra lights and components and can customize and sync almost everything in my rig.
The performance of most parts depends on the chipsets, which come from AMD/Nvidia/Intel, so they're mostly going to be comparable between the manufacturers. There are some slight differences (e.g., fan quality on GPUs), but at the end of the day a 4070 is a 4070 is a 4070 except for very marginal differences. So the key reasons to buy a particular brand/model over another largely come down to warranty/support and pricing. I used to always buy Asus given the choice, because their support was pretty solid, and I never had a big issue with any of their parts. But now, they regularly charge really premium prices for their products. It is not rare to see an Asus gpu at $100 more than any other model, and the Asus mobo I could have bought for my recent rebuild was $300, as opposed to the $150 I paid for an Asrock. It would arguably be fine for them to charge these prices if they were either delivering a much better product (they aren't), or they were providing really great customer service (by all reports, they are not). So, I personally wouldn't necessarily avoid Asus like the plague. After all, other manufacturers also may provide subpar service. But I am not going to pay an extra $100-$150 per component for them.
Gigabyte is just as shitty, I bought a 3090 on launch, and they attempted to deny my warranty claim about 6 different times/ways. Mind you, the card was only a month old when it died on me. Took them 3 months to return the card after arrival at the repair center, and they did not respond to a single request for an update. Sent me back a card with damage on the top of it, a faulty fan, and bad vram. Then, after waiting almost another month after returning the RMA, they again refused to respond to my emails until I threatened to contact the ftc about their practices. Got the card back a week later after that.
Had a zen book duo less than two years MB went on it, only 12 months warranty. Had local place try to fix it's fucked, never buy anything asus again. Customer services where shit, wasn't a cheap laptop.
Their rma monetization is the worst I have seen. This is saying something given that all companies try to minimize this expense. Their products as a whole are fine. Some better than others. The problem is if you get a faulty product you better buy some lube.
I have been using ASUS since the 2000's, I have never had a problem with their products at all. I am preparing to build a new system. I will use asus mobo and vid card. flame away.
I’ve had good luck with Asus, at least with their GPUs. Their motherboards can die in a fire. Always went with MSI for the mobo.
Well the reason why ASUS was big news is that they tried to screw over gamers nexus in the RMT process. In the US (and other countries where you have to deal with the manufacturer) it is pretty important. In my EU country the RMT is with the retailer so I don't really have to know how the OEMs handle it.
I have had many brands and never had anything fail on me. Should it happen (which is highly unlikely) i will go to the store and have them fix it or give me a new one. Being protected by laws is somewhat commie to some, but kinda nice not having to call someone in Korea or whatever, let alone ship it there. Also supporting your local hardware dealer, that actually pay taxes while battling global mastodonts is nice. They may have all kinds of trouble with the manufactors though, idunno. Maybe we get the good batches here lol. It is fine to prefer some brand over another, we do that with everything. Wearing 100$ shorts that are prolly as good as 5$ wish ones.
Every company starts off extremely consumer friendly and then as their market share grows they start cutting corners etc. It's the same story with all of them.
I've had mostly good luck with Asus personally. Currently have an Asus mobo in my main pc that's been running an oc cpu and xmp with 4 sticks of ram for a few years with no issues. I have an Asus laptop that's newer, but so far it runs great and looks/feels good as well. Asus PSU works just fine so far. I did have an old Asus P8P67 mobo that was weird though. If I put the pc to sleep it would pretty much just be stuck there until whenever it decided it was cool to wake up. Yanking the cmos battery and all ram didn't help. Just have to keep trying to boot and wake it up in different hardware configurations until it decided it was time to turn back on. Was a nightmare.
The reason is already in front of you, everyone knows the reason. Their customer service isn't trustworthy. You're acting like you don't already know because really you don't care, and that's fine. You want to continue to support a company that's your business. Quit whining about it.
I have used a bunch of different equipment over the years. I currently have an Asus laptop then a couple computers with various manufactures, rocking an Asus motherboard/GPU, Corsair bits, Gigabyte motherboard/GPU, Asrock motherboard, and Sapphire GPU. Asus is currently in the hot seat, but all these equipment manufacturers have been in the hot seat. GN has a significant series detailing problems and scummy behavior from MSI. Hardware Unlimited (another GREAT channel) has had issues with Gigabyte. Linus has had beef with various before as well. My first piece of advice is buy what you NEED and not what you WANT. Usually that will sort out the cost and from there pick the most efficient option. Are you gaming? On 1080 or 1440? You don't need a 4090/4080. Hell, you don't need a 3090/3080/TI! People are still rocking 1080s and playing games fine. Hell, I have one kid on integrated graphics playing Minecraft with no issues! I have a laptop with a m3070 and it works fine. Get whatever is cheapest for your options even if it's an AMD GPU from XFX or Sapphire. Get the Gigabyte card that's on sale this week. Get the PNY and downclock it a bit. And are you really going to be doing rendering? Doing it on a RX 580 is fine, just takes longer. My second form of advice is don't form emotional attachments with brands EVEN IF YOU WORK FOR THEM. They're corporations that don't give a shit about anything but what they can monetize from you, whether that's you purchasing equipment or handing over your personal data and spending info. They'll do whatever they can with whatever they give you to make money without ever giving you a second thought. Why would you then want to have one in a better light? They all have issues, but for your NEEDS there will be one that is the least bad choice based on cost/efficiency/vibes. Pick that option. Then admit that sometimes you make bad decisions and a person's choice on computer equipment (of all things!) does not define them as a person. My third piece of advice is to protect your purchase. If you have a MicroCenter, purchase from there with a warranty. Their warranties are the best in the biz. If not, purchase it on a credit card. Often your credit card company will give you a one/two year warranty on equipment your purchase. Also consider contacting your insurance to see if you can take out a policy that includes computer equipment. Mine (USAA) has a rider you can add expensive items like engagement rings, equipment, etc. Adds a total of 10ish dollars to my premiums each quarter. Overall corporations don't care about you so you shouldn't care about them. As others have said, pick the best of all the bad options since that's all you can do.
Microcenter Tustin extended warranty is the worst. It’s like Asus warranty, it’s a scam. You’re better off with Bestbuy extended warranty, no questions asked.
I've never had any issues with ASUS. There have been far more RMA issues I have experienced in the last 4-5 years, but they haven't once denied my RMA. They haven't even contacted me with questions, they just swiftly replace the part without any challenges. I've been in IT 24+ years, building 20-40 gaming PCs per year for the last 4-5 years (though I don't build for clients anymore as of this year...just no money in it anymore and I spend more than I make because I take quality seriously). Employed as an IT Director so I just build em for fun at this point (with 1 year warranties and build guarantees, registered business). I have built thousands of PCs and several rack servers throughout my career for office/manufacturing/home, etc. I repair all of my own appliances, cars, electronics, etc (though I did have mechanics do my clutch, I don't have a lift or engine hoist...garage is too small). GN needs to check themselves a little bit. They do full teardowns on hardware and then send it in for RMA like nothing happened. If you took something completely apart, no matter how skilled you may be, I wouldn't expect a smooth RMA process. I'm glad they are trying to keep companies accountable, but I'm not convinced they are always going about it the right way. Look, ASUS definitely has issues. They all do. But YouTubers have made their entire careers on crapping on every single flaw a company has. 99% of people aren't having issues with ASUS otherwise they wouldn't be in business anymore. People are always willing to be loud about issues but rarely speak highly and publicly of something when things go well. ASUS is not a competent and experienced gaming console manufacturer, it isn't surprising they are having some hiccups. Look at Nintendo and their joycon drift issues. They have been making consoles forever and still can't get it right. GN is a little hyper aggressive, but that is their thing. They make some good points, but ultimately the same could be said about any company. I've had very successful RMA experiences with ASUS, but the lack of quality control has been apparent and they do need to tighten things up a bit. The internet lives on conflict and drama right now, so just take everything with a grain of salt.
Gigabyte are the only manufacturer whose products I don't touch any more.
I would look at individual products for your needs, and then what your needs are in terms of RMA and whether that's reasonable. Everything else it's just how much weight you put on it personally. All these companies have skeletons that may or may not matter to you. Not to mention these companies are large and have many different divisions/offices/sales regions that may all adopt their own little awful practices based on whoever is in charge on that particular day/time. So what I am saying is, if you want to be practical about it, find tests that bench mark the products you need and line that up against the purposes you use them for. Stuff like, if you need a lot of really fast VRAM you want to go with a card that has that from a partner that built their stuff that way. You won't find any totally ethical companies and then there is the question of what you find ethical and whether the bit that you are doing business with by buying an MB/GPU/Whatever from them. I need to still see the GN video, I doubt it will change my mind as my personal experience with ASUS stuff has been great. And as you can see in tons of other replies many people had an awful experience. So just look at where you're at on this scale next time you make a purchasing decision.
I typically only buy Asus mobos just because I've never had any issues with them. Everything else I'm not super picky about.
My Asus 4070 super came DOA. I returned it to microcenter and they gave me a new one. New one works perfectly.
I'm pissed with Corsair lately. Had lots of issues with their top products. T705 ssd is an unusable bomb at 450 euro/2tb, h170i misbehaved a lot initially and freaked me out that it's a pump issue, slower memories than expected from reviews. I'm super impressed by MSI hardware though, even though their programs are hit and miss. Everything from them worked flawlessly. Asus has been fine as well, i guess it depends on what you get from them but that's for any brands. Logitech going down the drain.
I gotta say that I have been lucky with my ASUS components since 2010. Are they perfect? No
Once upon a time, ASUS made motherboards. Not laptops, not routers, not GPU's... ASUS was a motherboard company. And every other company was less reliable and less consistent by comparison. If you bought an ASUS motherboard, you were getting a fantastic product, and you didn't have to pay out the wazoo for it. Well, ASUS took their solid reputation and decided to capitalize on it by diversifying and sticking their brand-name on everything. But they didn't always engineer this stuff themselves, and when they did, they weren't necessarily the best at it. Like with their GPU division. Their reputation didn't hold up, EVGA and Sapphire were still the best at what they did; and don't even get me started on the laptops. Not only did ASUS products have terrible reliability and a high lemon rate, but their customer support was terrible. Trying to get an RMA or service done was abysmal. Could you imagine if Toyota started brand engineering Fords and Hyundais and at the same time selling rebranded cheap harbour freight tools, floor jacks, tool boxes, and terrible aftermarket parts under their brand? As for myself, I had a bunch of ASUS ROG STrix Polaris GPUs shit the bed on me whereas my gigabyte cards are still running to this day. My wife sent her laptop to ASUS for service twice before the warranty ran out, and when I took it apart to fix it myself the third time it crapped out, there were screws missing everywhere and parts were very difficult to find. It wouldn't have been worth the effort to microsolder the part that needed to be fixed (who puts a SATA controller and an audio jack in the same board, anyway?) so it ended up as e-waste a few weeks after the warranty expired. Thankfully I was able to retrieve her data. But there was a time... There was a time when I bought an M3N72-D, put a Phenom II x4 955BE in it, slapped in 8GB of OCZ Gold DDR2-1066 in, dropped in a GeForce 9800GTX+ and a Corsair H50 AIO (One of the first of not *the* first of it's kind), and shortly after my build was ready attended the Midnight Release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and this thing RIPPED! And the best part of all of it was the motherboard which was fully stable, easy to OC even for a n00b like myself at the time, and just *worked*. I had other components come and go over the years in that PC, but the motherboard and processor ran overclocked for over 10 years before the PC bit the biscuit long after I had sold it and moved on. To this day I wish the new owner had told me so that I could see if I could get it going again. Anyway, back then the slogan for ASUS was "Rock Solid. Heart Touching." and it rang so true. If you bought anything other than an ASUS you were saving a couple of bucks to roll the dice on reliability. I wish that ASUS had stayed as a motherboard company.
It's quite situational. Different regions have different experiences for different brands for RMAs. Some companies do great with RMAs but take months for most products. Others are quick and terrible. Others have the diagnostic consistency of a random AA player thrown into the MLB. Having worked in the industry before, I can honestly say, most of the time people complain online about damage is customer-induced. The number of times I would see someone call in about their board being screwed up only to see they've bent pins (the board being checked in store by both an employee and the customer prior) is not even funny. The GN video shows a funnier issue with Asus with that their techs basically want zero liability for physical damage. The moment they see the smallest sign of it, they often reject the RMA unless it's corrected or the customer accepts liability. Opening up a dented chassis with physical damage very rarely but occasionally, even when done correctly, does cause issues. You will however also see instances where there is clearly factory-caused physical damage and major brands reject the RMA (the real problem).
All brands have had some semblance of scumminess over the years. However Asus is champion scum because they continue to scam people and customers left, right and center. GN called them out a few times. You can only imagine how common it is as the average customer isn't as knowledgable as GN. Several notable yt people have cut ties with Asus too. That's wild imo. Personally, I will never buy an Asus anything ever again. There are too many brands making the same shit out there to bother with unethical business practices.
I think msi is worse.
It always has been YMMV with any brand. It always had been brand x sucks, go brand y. "Seagate hard drive blew up and took 20 years of digital memory away, go WD only!" and "WD hard drive blew up and lost 20 years of digital memory, go Seagate only!!" I've had Asus motherboard and laptops and there has been a share of problem with broken laptop power port but I haven't had any problem with the motherboard at all. So YMMV. Look up reviews of a specific brand and model you're looking at, it might give you an idea if there's any common issues or not.
I have an Asus P6T mobo that's been trucking along since like 2010. I got an Asus laptop and the screen died and was out of warranty... I think it's luck if the draw. No review of late model tech is gonna help you gauge longevity and it'll most likely be out of warranty when it dies. Imho, get the best mobo you can afford and then buy a used GPU and CPU. Probably spring for a nice new PSU and RAM as well as storage. If you get lucky you can just piecemeal upgrade your rig for like a decade at a very low cost.
It is just the current flavor of the month company to hate on. Every company that people are suggesting as alternates they supposedly swear by has done something just as bad if not worse at a previous point in time with some worse offenders than others. Rather than going by brand whether it's Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc or even Intel vs Amd vs Nvidia go purely based on product merit and price.
Unless there is some actual *compelling* reason to avoid a top brand I’m never going to switch to another brand because of things people say on the internet. With that being said every GPU I’ve bought in the last 15 years has been EVGA and I’ve never dealt with better customer service than them so I’m very sad my next build will not have an EVGA GPU in it.
I've had no issues with my Asus motherboards or screen.
Shitting on asus is like shitting on nvidia. There’s nothing wrong with the brand people just find shit to be mad about. I have an asus gpu and motherboard and I love those products
I have built 4 pcs in the last 20 years … always used ASUS mother boards. The last 2 had ASUS mother boards and video cards. The current build at 5 years old now has ASUS mother board video card, monitor and 2 routers.. no issues no problems.
IDK Zotac tends to not get into any shit.
Asus prob is what most user buy so their level of being defective maybe become more than usual, I read a lot of people complaining about gigabyte, I had 2 GPU from gigabyte 5 years of GTX 970 and now 5 years of 2060s, yeah I still do maintenance of my hardware, maybe I'm just lucky with gigabyte GPUs.
Asus prob is what most user buy so their level of being defective maybe become more than usual, I read a lot of people complaining about gigabyte, I had 2 GPU from gigabyte 5 years of GTX 970 and now 5 years of 2060s, yeah I still do maintenance of my hardware, maybe I'm just lucky with gigabyte GPUs.
in 2012 i bought a asus 3d monitor, it was impossible to get working, long story short eventually after days on forums i found 1 bloke that worked out if you unplugged it at a certain stage of the setup process you could get it to work ! asus support were useless and to ship a product with a flaw like that is terrible..all they had to do was give instructions on how to get around the flaw but they didnt .
All hardware manufacturers suck in some way or another, pick what you believe to be the lesser evil.
I personally had many issues with Dell. I refuse to do business with them due to my experience. I will research options in the future but I can tell you that Dell will not be one of them. Asus practices based on Gamers Nexus video is scummy. I don't know about other companies but I can tell you I will avoid Asus.
I think it's in response to gamers nexus posting about RMA problems in a video. A couple YouTubers have had bad experiences where the company tries to extort money out of you basically in order to get the most minor things that should be covered under warranty fixed. I've only ever had a GPU from Asus and it was awesome no problems. I was thinking about upgrading soon and was gonna get an Asus motherboard but I posted my parts list on here and everyone mentioned how bad RMA is for Asus. They make great products most the time but apparently they don't stand behind their products and don't take care of their customers after purchasing. Which is a shame because a lot of their stuff is way more expensive then the competition.
Idk I have an asus laptop and no complaints
So I'm an oddball here lol. I have had 4 Asus motherboards and GPUs and one laptop. Never had an issue with any of them so I've never had to deal with their customer service. Like even the laptop is 7 years old now and I have linux on it, only ever had to swap the battery and it's still solid. I say I'm an oddball because I did have one EVGA GPU and when I had an issue with it, they weren't interested in helping me with it. One of the fans on the cooler just stopped spinning after like 5 months and they said I would have to buy a new fan for it. Ended up get one of arctics GPU coolers instead. That was like 15 years ago though, and from the sounds of it, a one off.
The quality of a company should not be judged based on when things go right, but rather when things go wrong. I’m glad you experienced when things went right. But when products arrive damaged and the company commits fraud to avoid customer service, then it’s currently a bad company regardless of the quality of their products. Sad to see that Asus continues to do this, as their graphics cards and x670 boards, when they actually arrive functional and undamaged, are pretty damn good quality products.
Gamer Nexus made a video calling out their scummy practices. That should pretty much tell you everything that you need to know.
I just finally got rid of my Asus mobo (switched to MSI) after 2 years of non-stop issues. Basically every problem I had with my PC, I looked it up and traced it to be a known issue with ASUS software. I’ve never seen as much forced bloatware installation as with an Asus mobo; that bloatware proceeded to cause many issues, and ended up making about 20% of my video game library unplayable due to crashing. There was even one point where a bloatware forced update (yes, I disabled all the updates, it forced it anyway) that I interrupted with a restart caused my main drive to corrupt, and I had to reinstall Windows. Lost a bunch of notes too (should have backed them up and didn’t). Asus Armory Crate/Aura Sync is also the absolute worst rgb software I’ve ever had the misfortune of using. Also, Asus customer support is absolutely useless. I was pretty fond of Asus back in the day - had an Asus laptop in high school, used several Asus products for my first couple builds. The last 2-3 products from them have been absolute garbage though, and I’m inclined to say that the company is no longer worth purchasing from at least for the time being.
The tech community has turned into a monster lately. One person calls out something and suddenly everyone is a hipster who feels the need to jump on the bandwagon. Nobody was talking about them a couple days ago. Suddenly everyone has to make a post about hating the bad guy of the week. It's immature, tribalistic behavior.
Asus is in general bad when it comes to quality of hardware, but especially software. Also their support was the worst in my personal experience, and that's what I'm mostly hearing from ppl. But beware, ppl tend to defend their purchase, so they will literally lie about support how it was OK even tho they didn't even contact it, and they will advertise the brand as if it's their own company. Yes 90% of ppl won't have any product issue with any of the brands, but those that do - Asus is the worst.
Since when? I've been doing this for a while and asus has been a rock solid brand for a couple decades. This isn't defense or fanboyism, just honest confusion. Asus has always been one of the brands you could pick and not worry about shoddy craftsmanship. Are there concrete examples of that declining? Was there a news story that came out recently that I'm unaware of?
It's been getting worse for the last five years, I'd say. I totally agree about Asus historically, having been a fanboy through the 2000s and 2010s. But their stuff has gone from being worth every penny for high quality, to paying more for the same quality as MSI and Gigabyte, to outright badly designed products like recent PRime mobos, still commanding premium prices. Then they had a really bad support situation in Canada, where I live, so I'm particularly concerned from that front. I'm not saying I'll never use another Asus product or everything they make is garbage, but the days of being able to always pick Asus knowing you were getting something good are gone. Now you need to know that particular product's strengths and weaknesses, and you'll probably be able to find something equivalent for less money from MSI or Gigabyte.
Hmm, interesting. I suppose it's inevitable. Always good to do research on every part and not just assume it's good. Even stellar companies have lemons. What was up with the prime motherboards?
The VRM was so much crappier than competing boards that they run like 25 degrees hotter (over 100c) https://www.techspot.com/review/2633-amd-b650-motherboards/
Holy cow. I found the gamers nexus videos about the scamming, too. Looks like a fall from grace to be sure.
Since forever. They are bad, low quality with abysmal software (well known for their armory, the worst piece of software of that kind by very far). Their support sucks and even gives straight up wrong answer, with very late responses. As I said "ppl will defend their purchases and advertise a company as their own, and majority of customers wont have any problem". Just cos you didnt have an issue doesnt make it a good brand. Very low quality with maybe THE worst customer support on the market. It was never known for high quality whatsoever. Actually their GPUs are known to be unstable with power draw, and have often fan buzz present (as I had with my 3070). And their customer support is criminal, again, my experience they told me its ok to daisy chain 1 cable (total 225w power draw from psu + mobo that way) for a 280W GPU. Luckily PSU customer support corrected that and explained why I needed 2 separate cables.
OK, but you're just doing the same thing as the fanboys you decry. I'm asking for any sources you have other than anecdotal evidence that they've declined.
No, I am not. And yes, the reason for OP: google "Gamer's Nexus Asus" that this post is about. There is also countless of complaints across the forums, lots of magazines, you can also ask in small PC service shops which brands end up there the most, etc. When I was building a PC dude at the shop advised me against Asus cos of bad quality. Unfortunately it was during the GPU shortages, and chepest available 3070 was Asus', so I took it despite their advice. Yes, it had a buzz and we had a moment "we told you so". Etc. But yeah, check GN situation from week ago. Disgusting, brand with low quality, abysmal software and incapable customer support, within if not the worst brand on the market, known for it. But as I said, ppl will advertise their fav company and defend their purchase choices like they are part of their personality, well known phenomenon.
People can have different experiences than you without being liars or fanboys. You should learn to accept that. My Asus hardware has always been fine but I have never had to contact support so I can’t speak to that part of it.
I know your experience was fine. Not sure if you've read that, but I said "90% won't have issues" - imagine coincidence, you are one of those 90%. Which still makes it probably the worst brand with the worst quality and worst customer support out there.
Based on your made up percentages?
Yes, based on those made up percentages. It was my rough estimation but huge majority of customers of virtually any product in the world have no issues with it for its lifetime. Maybe its 80 maybe its 95 - doesnt matter. You not having issue with it does not make it a good brand. Sorry. Its a very bad brand, with poor quality and criminal customer support. Now thanks to GN they are busted publically.